Easy...?
So go on, tell us: what's the security like?
1657 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
See, normally parents are all proud and stuff cos their particular little brat is "special". But whenever it suits you, you're willing to take the opposite view -- that your child is 100% identical to every other child, so if anyone claims a child is different from yours it's clearly their fault.
"We hadn't noticed much noise coming from the rest of Christianity wanting to dissociate themselves from those fundies. If you don't wanna be identified with them, better say so publicly."
Well then you weren't paying attention. Both the Vatican and the Archbishopric of Canterbury publicly commemorated the 200/150th Darwin anniversary last year.
The simple fact is that the fundies are obsessed with the idea that evolution is wrong. Most people who believe in natural selection are not "obsessed" with it and as such simply do not devote as much time and energy to the subject as the obsessives.
You may similarly suggest that most vegetarians share PETA's extreme views because "they don't make as much noise" as PETA.
It would be a sad existence indeed if we had to devote our lives to shouting very loudly about what we aren't.
Think this conclusion was surely to be expected.
Females mammals (all vertebrates?) are born with their ova (eggs) already formed in their ovaries.
Males, on the other hand, produce their reproductive cells by cell division in their testes over the course of their life.
In the case of humans, eggs have a genetic code formed from DNA that's less than a year old, whereas sperm has a code from DNA that's at least 13, and possibly over 70 years old.
The majority of genetic mutations are therefore introduced into the gene pool by the degradation of the DNA in the male reproductive organs.
Any chromosome present in both male and female populations will undergo significant mutation via the male population, but be "normalised" by the less mutated female cells. If the environment does not favour mutation (and populations often prefer the status quo), over generations, the "conservative" female-transmitted gene will be selectively preserved.
The Y chromosome is the only thing not transmissable by females. This means that there is no "conservative" female line and the gene is left to mutate like crazy.
It's a fairly logical outcome, although it's fair enough that people don't think about it before they see the evidence.
"the ITU said the next generation of the technology will enable just that. It will require the transmission of multiple 3D images in parallel, each view selected as the playback system tracks the motion of the viewer."
What about people who (*gasp*) watch TV with friends and family? Which viewer exactly is the TV expected to track.
Man is not descended from the *currently living* great apes, but given our massive genetic similarity to chimps and bonobos, and the relatively big genetic difference between us and orangutangs, our common ancestor with the chimp would have been a member of the ape family, something which had evolved after the split between the African Homonidae (gorillas, chimps) and the Eastern Homonidae (whence modern Orangutans).
Man is descended from apes -- the "missing link" being sought is when man ceased to be an ape and became man.
OK, so UK law protects "only following orders", but let me ask you this:
Is it not still the case that evidence illegally procured is inadmissible in court? As such, random stop-and-search is still a very bad idea, because even if by random luck you find a terrorist masterplan, the address book of the entire Al-Qaeda network and a nugget of weapons-grade plutonium, any attempts to prosecute would (or should) get thrown out of court (wrongful arrest, inadmissible evidence etc). Any attempts to get a court-order for surveillance would have to be turned down (again, no admissible evidence).
I don't suppose the Reg could ask the Home Office about that, could you?
"How can a Gummint impose that with legal download (Gutenberg)"
VAT is a percentage of sale price ("value" added tax is a misnomer). 17.5% of free = 0. And 0 tax is easy to collect.
"and illegal D/L"
Hmmm... Last time I checked, the plague of drug-fuelled happy-slapping hoodie-shoplifters terrorising our inner cities (as defined by the Daily Mail) hadn't caused the government to abolish VAT on the items most commonly shoplifted....
* Quite right:
UFC is not suitable for children, so should not be automatically exempt. The sporting exemption should not extend to combat sports. The BBFC should, however, have the right to grant an automatic classification to sporting events carried out under the auspices of a sport's official governing body. The level of violence in competition karate, jiu-jitsu etc is heavily regulated and blood-letting is only ever the result of accidents. PG seems suitable, even without viewing the video. UFC has a predictable amount of blood and injury and it would be safe to say it should always have a mature rating, although I'm not sure whether 15 or 18 is more suitable.
* Quite right:
The modern music video is an entertainment artform, and is often constructed in the manner of a short film (consider the milk cartons in Blur's "Coffee and TV"). The exemption was based on the idea of a performance recording -- a band on stage, an orchestra in the orchestra pit, whatever. A true performance recording maybe should still be exempt, but why should a modern music video by treated differently from any other short film?
* Quite wrong:
That any parliament should introduce wide ranging powers under the justification of preventing the extreme and unarguable case. Publicising the extreme case is nothing more than misleading the public.
Hopefully doctors faced with cases of the "Pandora blues" will have the good sense to recommend things like
* A trip to the Rockies.
* A hike in Yellowstone.
* Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon.
* A boat journey on the Hudson or Amazon River.
* A trip on an Antarctic icebreaker.
* Crewing a yacht round the Hebrides.
* Sea kayaking in a Norwegian fjord.
* Piloting a river barge on the Canal du Midi.
* River-rafting through Nepal from the foothills of the Andes.
* Snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef.
* Walking the Great Wall of China.
...is there a limit on the size of these text boxes? [cont p.96]
I'm glad to hear the package is good, but since the initial planning stages, there's been a revolution in Small Cheap Computing. The pilot should be reconsidered as a proof of concept, and the nationwide rollout should be based on new SCC/netbook/nettop technology. Preferably with HDMI so that we can go back to the old days of using a single screen as both the TV and computer monitor.
Unfortunately, if they ever offer a plan without a handset at a discounted price, they can no longer claim that the bundled handset is "free".
That way they fail to sell -- sorry, "give away" -- the latest new device. Not only does that mean lost handset sales -- I mean "giveaways", sorry -- but as the latest phones encourage you to use more data it's a lost opportunity to sell bigger data plans....
If you're ever taken hostage, tell your captors that if they kill you before releasing you, the capitalist dogs won't have to pay your wages, but if they keep you alive for a couple of years you will be able to attack the cold hard of the bourgeoisie with a massive overtime claim.
The great pick-n-mix of iTunes is killing the album.
Of course, the album's integrity was continually undermined during the nineties and naughties by gimmick marketing: incessant "bonus features" destroyed the experience for the listener.
The "hidden track" was never well hidden and meant your CD would go silent for a minute or three before playing a minute or two of title track reprise. Kind of took the point out of getting a CD multichanger if you couldn't just let your CDs run continuously.
The "rerelease album with extra track that we released as a single" or "now with added bonux tracks" thing almost invariably led to an inconsistent sound across the album (because the tracks were recorded at a different time with different instruments and/or settings and possibly even a different band line-up), a bit like inserting a purple picture into a collection from Picasso's blue period -- similar, maybe; good, again maybe; out of place, definitely.
And then there was remix fever, which meant getting two or three songs from the album repeated at the end in a completely unrecognisable version in a style that fans of the artist's original style probably wouldn't like anyway. This combines the negative effects of deja vu with a rather extreme version of the inconsistency of the "wrong colour" bonus tracks problem above.
The album should be able to be taken as a single work or a collection of works (consider that "opera" is a Latin plural word, yet many purists still hold that a single piece from an opera cannot be fully appreciated outside of the complete opera). Short-sighted sales-chasing by the labels undermined that and now they're taking the hit.
The word processing features in Word have been made harder to use by the interference caused by the half-@r$€d implementation of DTP within the application.
There's technical problems (eg the invisible formatting markup for a paragraph sometimes magically disappears when you chose to delete the wrong word or carriage return) and there's user problems (people start focusing on layout too early on and it distracts from the content).
" With the next preview release of Opera 10.5, it will add support for native video codecs, mirroring what Mozilla has done with Firefox. "
Praytell... will that mean adding in another set of codecs for each video type, or will it happily share the codecs that I installed for VLC?
"According to Polzein he was forced to come down on the interstate to avoid an even more dangerous descent into trees."
Descending into trees put one man in danger. Descending on the interstate -- in an unlicensed, illegal vehicle -- puts dozens of lives in danger.
A man who takes risks should learn to accept the consequences.
"Google has zero cost of entry if you have a computing device capable of running a web browser and accessing the internet."
Urm... really? You think my Vista PC and Virgin media "L" cable subscription is going to let me crawl, cache and index the entire internet, or even a substantial proportion of it?
In 2005 Google estimated that the internet was 5 exabytes in size, and they'd only just broken the 170 terabyte mark in their indexing.
What happens if we assume that Google's index is about a petabyte?
To get all that data, it would take me 277,777,778 hours assuming maximum throughput and no throttling by Virgin. That's 11,574,074 days, or 31,688 years. And in the meantime, the data keeps changing.
To store it, I'd need one thousand hard-drives, at about 100 quid each -- £100,000! But of course, I'd need some way of connecting them to my Compaq laptop, which doesn't have any external SATA capacity, never mind 1000 ports. That would take a full data centre SAN setup.
The start-up costs are far from zero.
Yes, Google has massively increased the user experience, but the price that they charge the user has increased.
The data they take from users is exceptionally valuable, and that value is increasing exponentially as they take more and more.
Google is doing what every good monopoly does: increase its price after capturing the user base.
The thing is, because we don't see the direct cost of the price rise, we disregard it as negligible and don't move to competitors.
So now I just need to type "time" and I get the time in the UK, because Google knows where I am despite connecting from a multinational company network. But that is a cheap function, and certainly not worth the vast amount of potential marketing cash that Google make by knowing where I live. It's not a hardship to have to type "time in UK", certainly, and that's if my PC didn't already have a clock.
The only thing that stops us Europeans and North Americans killing our wildlife is that we've already done so. Bears, wolves, bison, auroch, beaver, reindeer -- these species have been wiped out completely in parts of Europe and in some cases in their entirety.
I'm not saying we should allow other countries to make the same mistakes as us, just that it is sheer bigotry and hypocrisy to criticise them without acknowledging our own past mistakes. In fact, it borders on racism.
"Yes atheists have commited mass murder aginst religous groups but you don't see atheist killing atheist because they don't like their version of atheism."
You're clearly not up on the history of the USSR then.
Soviet Communism is a secular, atheistic political philosophy. Much like the religious, theistic philosophy called Christianity, Soviet Communism underwent a significant amount of schism.
In a very real sense, they killed Trotsky because his atheism didn't match Stalin's.
"Though tidally locked with respect to the gas-planet, the moons would rotate with respect to the local sun, so getting evenly-distributed sunlight and heat."
Are they perhaps forgetting about that nasty little spell when the entire moon is eclipsed by the planet? Taking the major moons of Jupiter as our model, we have periods of:
Io: 1.77 Earth days
Europa: 3.55 Earth days
Ganymede: 7.16 Earth days
Callisto: 16.7 Earth days
We're talking of a planetwide total blackout of somewhere between half an Earth day and about 4 Earth days.
Now consider the local cooling that occurs locally when half the Earth is in darkness and imagine what 4 days of a global lack of sunlight would be like. Even the hottest summer days would suffer nights on an arctic scale.
Good question.
As I understand it, anything repeated within 7 days is officially a "retransmission", not a "repeat".
How do the figures cope with that? Do they eliminate all retransmissions, whether of new material or repeated material, and then compare? I hope so, because counting a half hour program retransmitted three times as two hours of "new" material would be pretty shoddy in my view.
"The rub is that if a quantum system interacts with the classical world..."
If quantum computation fails based on the classical world, surely we should stop calling it "quantum computation"? That blend of both classical languages surely means that even talking about it destroys the effect!!!!
With the lion's share of all search results, and the vast majority of the targeted advertising market, Google are a monopoly.
The problem with IE was that its lack of standards compliance was used to leverage sales of Microsoft webserver and web authoring software.
Google is a monopoly, but not in the desktop space. Antitrust proceedings would only follow if Google use their monopoly position in the search space to force their way into the desktop space. Like ranking all ChromeOS machines above others if you Google "netbook", for example.
In fact, I don't think it'll be long before a court orders an audit of Google's secret magic potion for exactly that reason.
We all know that the US is a terrorist organisation.
The principles of terrorism:
1. Produce terror or paralysing fear.
Rest assured that many Afghanis and Iraqis are sh*tt*ng bricks as we speak.
2. Publicity to gain sympathy.
Propaganda in the form of things like dodgy dossiers is complemented by the self-publicising wars waged in the name of "freedom".
3. Stimulation of indiscriminate hostility.
The result of the USA's "war against terror" is that attacks by fundamentalists against Western targets have increased. The USA has caused these elements to be more indiscriminate, which fuels the publicity that suggests that the USA are "the good guys".
This is how terrorism has always worked. Use violence to make the other guys more violent, therefore winning more converts to your own cause.
Unfortunately, when both sides use terrorist tactics, the result is a constant escalation which leads us nearer and nearer to a third world war.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, and tit-for-tat makes tits of us all....
The best thing about this keyboard is that it disproves the existence of common sense.
Most of my brain is screaming about wasted space, and about how making keys smaller makes them harder to use, but the logical part understands exactly why it's a better keyboard.
Long live boffins and their counterintuitive revolutionary solutions to everyday problems.
You certainly have a point.
Any legislation for software patents should be part of a *reduction* of patent lifespans.
The point of patents is to encourage innovation and invention by allowing the inventor/innovator to recoup the cost of research (and hopefully profit on the deal). Any revision to patent law for computer software has to be part of a wider patent reform that notes that computer simulations have drastically cut the cost of research and the time taken in research.
From this it follows that the exclusivity period should be equally cut.
This leads to a conclusion that will be uncomfortable for some:
"Proper" invention -- devices -- can be simulated easily, whereas the effects of drugs need lots of genuine physical trials. This means that medical research would need the current limit, and it's "proper invention" that would need reduced.
The guy's point was that some people who are not catholics -- catholics being people who pray in big churches and believe wine is blood -- call themselves catholics almost as though it is a nationality. It's not -- it's a way of life. If you don't live that way of life, how can you be a catholic?
His implication was that the "catholics" PETAburd mentioned probably fall into this category.
Christian symbolism is associated with a Christian identity. It's rude to misappropriate or subvert someone's identity to your own ends -- at best it's putting words in people's mouths, at worst it's fraudulent misrepresentation. You wouldn't want PETA implying that they were endorsed by the GB Olympic team would you? They aren't, so they shouldn't. Why should they imply any divine mission if they're not endorsed by any organised religion? If they wanted to set up a "Church of Jesus Saviour of Puppies", that would be a different matter -- but they haven't, so they shouldn't be implying any religious whatjimidoobrit.
" Murdoch's thinking is flawed. ... In effect he seems to believe X fee visits per day will amount to £X of revenue at £1 per visit. "
Not at all. Murdoch doesn't expect to get the same number of eyeballs.
What he believes is that going from X million eyeballs at £0.00 per eyeball per month to a mere Y hundred at £5.99 a month is an infinite increase in income. One paying customer is worth a billion non-paying leeches.
But then it's not probably not about the website at all. We're at a crossroads: free web has killed pay web, but people are still paying for stuff via iPhone apps that they could get for free on the net. EReader users are paying more for PDFs than they would pay for paperbacks. He needs to get into that market. Free web newspapers challenge that revenue stream.
The appliance market is still open and that's the one Murdoch wants. More and more professional information will be migrating from the net to the appliance market. Goodnight interwebs.
BBC content on BT Vision is licensed by BBC Worldwide, the same guys who are part of Dave.
The difference between BBC 1 and iPlayer on one hand and Dave and BT Vision on the other, is that genuine BBC content gets first broadcast rights on BBC and iPlayer. The BBC are allowed to license it out a year after first broadcast, when it is considered archive material. BBC 1 and iPlayer also carry material supplied by third party studios, which is contractually bound to be only supplied as part of the BBC's license-funded services.
You sir, are a coward and a troll. Yes, a troll. Saying you don't believe in any god(s) is one thing. Saying you think religion is stupid is fairly objectionable, but still within your rights. But as soon as you start talking about "sky pixies" you are clearly just stirring it and being objectionable for the sake of it.
If you genuinely think religion is some kind of mental deficiency, ask yourself this: do you call the local mentally disabled kids names? Do you tease them about their handicap?
Or maybe you think it's an addiction. Do you chant "alkie, alkie" at every drunk on the street? Do you throw pebbles at heroine addicts on the street?
So what's so special about religion that makes it OK to tease people for sport?